Top 505 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Physicians - Page 2

Whenever you fall, pick something up.

I became a physician in order to help save lives. I am at once a physician, a citizen, and a woman, and I am not willing to stand aside and allow the concept of expendable human lives to turn this great land of ours into just another exclusive reservation where only the perfect, the privileged, and the planned have the right to live.

Soon the day will come when science will win victory over error, justice a victory over injustice, and human love a victory over human hatred and ignorance.

A lot of the appeal of internal medicine is Sherlockian—solving the case from the clues. We are detectives; we revel in the process of figuring it all out. It’s what doctors most love to do.

When health is absent, wisdom cannot reveal itself, art cannot become manifest, strength cannot be exerted, wealth is useless, and reason is powerless.

The (Laetrile) efficacy tests...clinically in humans..(by) the US NCI...were obviously conducted so that a negative result could be formulated. The limited number and types of human cancer cases selected...the omission of necessary additional measures ('e.g dietary'), the far too short observation periods, and the undefined chemical properties of the (Laetrile)... all contributed to devaluation of...conclusions.

Nagging is the repetition of unpalatable truths.

I still am amazed that people would never buy a car if they were told it gets 75 miles to the gallon - they're absolutely clear on what's a scam. But when it comes to their health they will immediately fall for somebody telling them, "Take this pill and you'll live to be a hundred years old." There's something about medicine that allows us to fall for stupid sales pitches more easily.

The key to freedom is accepting my own autonomy as an individual, and respecting the autonomy of other individuals, with all of what that means - whatever that means.

I am not accustomed to saying anything with certainty after only one or two observations.

Be grateful for challenges because... Had there been no difficulties and no thorns in the way, then [each woman and] man would have been in his primitive state and no progress made in civilisation and mental culture.

I think the evidence is pretty clear. If you look at various characteristics of carnivores versus herbivores, it doesn't take a genius to see where humans line up.

The leading and characteristic features of the morbid state to which I would direct your attention are, anaemia, general languor and debility, remarkable feebleness of the heart's action, irritability of the stomach, and a peculiar change of the colour in the skin, occurring in connection with a diseased condition of the suprarenal capsules.

The road to a clinic goes through the pathologic museum and not through the apothecary's shop.

I early conceived a liking for, and sought every opportunity to relieve the sufferings of others.

It is an art of no little importance to administer medicines properly: but, it is an art of much greater and more difficult acquisition to know when to suspend or altogether to omit them.

Quality without science and research is absurd. You can't make inferences that something works when you have 60 percent missing data.

The profession to which we belong, once venerated...-has become corrupt and degenerate to the forfeiture of its social position.

The absorption and organization of sunlight, the essence of life, is derived almost exclusively through plants. Since light is the driving force of every cell in our bodies, that is why we need green plants.

Faith is the only known cure for fear.

When health workers are infected at work, this puts other healthcare workers at risk, but also can be a risk to all other patients, understanding where the breach in these measures is occurring and taking the steps needed to fully implement infection prevention and control measures can put an end to these ... infections.

Man's brain is, after all, the greatest natural resource.

The Silurian Period-the grandest of all the Periods,-and, as yet, apparently the seed-time of all succeeding life.

When people's ill, they come to I, I Physics, bleeds, and sweats 'em; Sometimes they live, sometimes they die. What's that to I? I lets 'em.

It is common error to infer that things which are consecutive in order of time have necessarily the relation of cause and effect.

In the complex course of its evolution, life exhibits a remarkable contrast to the tendency expressed in the Second Law to Thermodynamics. Where the Second Law expressed an irreversible progression toward increased entropy and disorder, life evolves continually higher levels of order. The still more remarkable fact is that this evolutionary drive to greater and greater order also is irreversible. Evolution does not go backward.

The human body is the only machine for which there are no spare parts.

The thing that bugs me is that the people think the FDA is protecting them - it isn’t. What the FDA is doing and what the public thinks it’s doing are as different as night and day.

If one is cruel to himself, how can we expect him to be compassionate with others?

To see the convulsions, agonies and tortures of a poor fellow-creature, whom they cannot restore nor recompense, dying to gratify luxury and tickle callous and rank organs, must require a rocky heart, and a great degree of cruelty and ferocity. I cannot find any great difference between feeding on human flesh and feeding on animal flesh, except custom and practice.

Belief unconfirmed by experiment is vain.

It is a lot harder to keep people well than it is to just get them over a sickness. Take care of yourself.

You could say people are living longer because of the decline in religion. Not many people believe in the hereafter, so they keep going.

As it takes two to make a quarrel, so it takes two to make a disease, the microbe and its host.

For the first time there was constructed with this machine [locomotive engine] a self-acting mechanism in which the interplay of forces took shape transparently enough to discern the connection between the heat generated and the motion produced. The great puzzle of the vital force was also immediately solved for the physiologist in that it became evident that it is more than a mere poetic comparison when one conceives of the coal as the food of the locomotive and the combustion as the basis for its life.

I am delighted that I have found a new reaction to demonstrate even to the blind the structure of the interstitial stroma of the cerebral cortex. I let the silver nitrate react with pieces of brain hardened in potassium dichromate. I have already obtained magnificent results and hope to do even better in the future.

The best model of a cat is another cat..., specially the same cat.

Style is when they're running you out of town and you make it look like you're leading the parade.

What is a Person? is a clear and comprehensive reconsideration of the meaning of human personhood as the central core of social structures. With breadth of intellect and balance of wisdom, Smith resets the frame of reflection for the most important discussions of the twenty-first century.

If one is to use public funds he must accept a responsibility to the public.

Dedicate some of your life to others. Your dedication will not be a sacrifice. It will be an exhilarating experience because it is an intense effort applied toward a meaningful end.

Men are made stronger on realization that the helping hand they need is at the end of their own arm.

We profess to teach the principles and practice of medicine, or, in other words, the science and art of medicine. Science is knowledge reduced to principles; art is knowledge reduced to practice. The knowing and doing, however, are distinct. ... Your knowledge, therefore, is useless unless you cultivate the art of healing. Unfortunately, the scientific man very often has the least amount of art, and he is totally unsuccessful in practice; and, on the other hand, there may be much art based on an infinitesimal amount of knowledge, and yet it is sufficient to make its cultivator eminent.

The fact that your patient gets well does not prove that your diagnosis was correct.

Nowhere is wisdom more necessary than in the guidance of charitable impulses. Meaning well is only half our duty; Thinking right is the other, and equally important, half.

In Elementary Music The Relation Of Earth To The Sphere of Water is 4 to 3, As There Are In The Earth Four Quarters of Frigidity to Three of Water.

These hormones still belong to the physiologist and to the clinical investigator as much as, if not more than, to the practicing physician. But as Professor Starling said many years ago, 'The physiology of today is the medicine of tomorrow'.

Climb the mountains, search the valleys, the deserts, the seashores, the deep recesses of the earth, for only in this way and no other will you arrive at the true nature of things.

Dermatology ... this young daughter of medicine.

Some brewers of Ale and Beere doe put it into their drinke to make it more heady, fit to please drunkards, who thereby, according to their several dispositions, become either dead drunke, or foolish drunke, or madde drunke.

U.S. surgeons operate on the wrong body part as often as 40 times a week.

The single greatest impediment to error prevention in the medical industry is that we punish people for making mistakes.

One function of the librarian, as he saw it, was to blunt the edge of these differences and to provide a means whereby the rich and poor could live happily side by side. The public library was a great leveler, supplying a literature by which the ordinary man could experience some of the pleasures of the rich, and providing a common ground where employer and employee could meet on equal terms.

A very good drink they call Chaube that is almost as black as ink and very good in illness, especially of the stomach. This they drink in the morning early in the open places before everybody, without any fear or regard, out of clay or China cups, as hot as they can, sipping it a little at a time.

The tools used by the surgeons must be adapted to the task and where the human brain is concerned they cannot be too refined.

The perfidious, savage, disdainful, stupid, slothful, inhospitable, stupid English.

A prudent person profits from personal experience, a wise one from the experience of others.

Black! Black! Black! I am proud of being a Negro. Nor have I ever tried to beg tolerance from anyone. Superiority is not proved by color, but by the brain, by education, by willpower, by moral courage.

What hope is there for medical scienceto ever become a true sciencewhen the entire structure of medical knowledgeis built around the idea that there is an entity called diseasewhich can be expelled when the right drug is found?

It is astonishing how little one feels alone when one loves.